US News 2017 rankings

College Search & Selection
461

Another consideration is that all of these schools have different focuses on strengths which also makes it kind of hard to compare directly.

So like at the top tier, Harvard, Stanford and MIT are more preprofessional/practical and Yale, Princeton are more intellectual, theoretical.
And on the next tier Penn is more preprofessional and Columbia, Chicago are more theoretical, intellectual.

Of course all of these schools have a bit of both, but one can say this is the focus/vibe of each.

So probably including both outcomes about academia, academic scholarships (Rhodes, Marshall etc) and industry placement, salary would improve the rankings. I wonder why USNews have not done something like this yet.

462

My take on rankings, by tier:

Tier 1: Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT
Tier 2: Columbia, Chicago, Caltech
Tier 3: Penn, Duke, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Brown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins

One can make an argument that Penn might be tier 2 (mostly based on high rankings of its professional schools), but PA scores indicate otherwise (and lower than Cornell and JHU).

463

This is the link to the interview with the editor of USNWR http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/princeton-university-tops-college-rankings-list-for-fourth-year-in-a-row/

464

@kimfuge88 Just for the fun of it, mine would be (thinking of the order in which I’d recommend them to my children for undergrad):

Tier 1: Stanford, Princeton, Chicago, MIT, Caltech
Tier 2: Harvard, Yale, possibly Columbia
Tier 3: Penn, Duke, Brown, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Cornell

465

The rise of Chicago is really interesting. In SoCal, it does not seem to be on the students radar as strongly as it is for posters here, as far as I have seen. Northwestern, Columbia, Penn even UWashSTL all tend to be higher in students minds for “big” universities (after the usual suspects of Harvard, MIT, Stanford.)

Has anyone compiled the “fastest movers” on the list? I think Chicago used to be pretty consistently in high teens back in the late 90’s (Last time I paid any serious attention). I read an interesting analysis of Northeastern’s concerted effort to rise in the rankings (while they transformed the school.)

I wonder who has managed to figure out USNew’s formula the best.

466

@CaliDad2020


[QUOTE=""]

I wonder who has managed to figure out USNew’s formula the best.

[/QUOTE]

Northeastern, for sure. From 160s to 39 in a dozen or so years? Wow.

467

@insanedreamer

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/

468

@Calidad2020 on Post #466, I looked up the archive from usnwr, UChicago’s ranking record in the whole nineties is as follows: '90 #9; '91 #11; '92 #10; '93 #9; '94 #9; '95 #10; '96 #11; '97 #12; '98 #14; '99 #14. '00 #13.

For what it’s worth, Chicago has never been in the high teens since the beginning of the usnwr college ranking. The University was in the Top Ten 21 times out of the 30 years usnwr ranking history.

P.S. by the way, my screen name should be Theluckystar and I have not checked in for some time. For some reason, I could not get my password reset as Theluckystar, but luckypa instead. Too lazy to figure it out.

469

@luckypa guess I was remembering those 98/99 rankings. I have not been paying much attention to college ranking since back then - until my kids got “of college thinking age” the last couple of years.

Still interesting (to me anyway) how Chicago seems much less on SoCal kid’s radar even than Northwestern, UWStL or UMich, so it can’t just be the weather or “fly over” location! I saw a stat where 15% of UofChic recent class was from the “west” but that included CA, Or, Wa, Id, Nev, Wy, Ask, Ha… which is probably 18 - 20% of the US overall population? (too lazy to see what % of the US college going population, but probably in the 20% ballpark) so it’s not way off base for the region.

Anyway, still a nice strong rise for the last 15 years. Good for UofC marketing! Chicago needs some positive press these days.

and depending on what folks want to use rankings for, it seems to me that lists (if they are being used for any type of prospective student comp) should be broken out by size, location, geography, department strength. Having interviewed in CA for a “brand name” big urban east coast U, I talk to kids all the time who have no real understanding of what they would be getting themselves if they were accepted. They checked the stats for top ranked U’s, found the ones where they were 25% or above, and filled out the common app. Next they know they’re in the snow in New Hampshire or downtown Baltimore and are like: huh?

470

@CaliDad2020, here is an analysis of changes from 2010 to 2014:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/local/us-news-college-ranking-trends-2014/1292/

471

@UWfromCA Looking at those drops for UCSC and UCR you just gotta scratch your head.

UCSC, for instance, has gotten way more competitive in those years, and the quality of the incoming class has risen. Wonder what accounts for the big drop? Guess other schools have improved more on the USNews scale.
UCSC
2016 - 3.85 mean GPA. 58% acceptance rate - 45K + applications
2011 - 3.5 mean GPA 67% acceptance rate 28k applications

472

There has to be a starting point for a high school student and their parents to find information about colleges and the college application process. Even good GC’s cannot know all the details. The USNews rankings and College Confidential are good starting points. A USNews online subscription and/or purchasing the magazine are cheaper than even buying the Fiske guide.

Some questions posed here on CC by both students and parents are very naive:
Do loans have to be paid back?
Can I go to medical school part time?
What colleges offer an undergraduate degree in law?
My dream school is Harvard, would Cornell be a good safety?
In state tuition is so much cheaper than OOS tuition. Why doesn’t everyone just check the in state box on the application? (from a parent)

But I agree that the bickering about relative ranking of school X and school Y gets tiresome.

473

@TomSrOfBoston

That’s my biggest disappointment with how widespread the cursory scanning of USNews as a “college search” seems to be.

USNews is set up more as a beauty contest than a guide. It would be more useful (if what you are using it for is college search and not bragging rights) I think, if the categories were a bit more narrow (and, I’d suggest, that would help suggest the kind of questions a kid should be asking.)

But, of course, I don’t run the circus, Mr. Morse does - and he does a whole lot more work on it than I ever would. And plus we get to have these fun discussions every year. It is funny to think I picked my college without USNews. I feel like I must have written my application with a quill by candle-light!

474

@Postmodern ,

Interesting you chose that book to make your case. First that is about affirmative action, not SES. But in any case, this book seems to have had no sales as it has very few reviews, and the most pointed review is that Bowen is unwilling to make the data available to verify or contradict his findings.

Anyway, getting back my point about SES. An exemplary education costs a great deal of money in order to hire outstanding faculty and support staff, and pay for the top-notch physical infrastructure that the most talented students now expect. This cost is usually considerably more than the cost of tuition, and so it means that the difference needs to be made up through returns on the endowment.

The HYPSMs of the world have huge endowments {$38B, $24B,$21B, $21B, and $12B) respectively. The returns from this endowment allow them to seek the strongest low-SES candidates knowing that they can comfortably forego the tuition from those students.

But it is the next tier down that faces the cash crunch. It is not that they don’t want to bring in low-SES students. It is that the math doesn’t allow it. The per-student cost for faculty, staff and infrastructure is just about the same. But WUSTL’s endowment is $6.8B and its number of undergraduates (7300) is higher than any of the HYPSMs.

The right thing for these colleges to do is to maintain their excellent faculty and infrastructure, and do what they can to bring in outstanding students who can help balance the budget. By all metrics they are succeeding in that front. WUSTL’s average SAT score is 2220-the same as MIT’s!

What @LBad96 is suggesting is that WUSTL should be more generous to low-SES students. But math is unforgiving. What is given up in return? Do they spend less on infrastructure maintenance? Do they give up the outstanding food that attracts students? Do they not hire star professors? Any of these paths will eventually lead to lower ratings, not higher.

The long-game for a WUSTL is to maintain/improve its teaching quality and work on improving the endowment. That will eventually allow it to do what everyone (including me) wants it to do in terms of providing opportunities for low-SES students. But for now, and given their situation, WUSTL is making the right choice.

475

One more thing about WUSTL. It is on D’s list and we visited it along with many other colleges. The visit to WUSTL was by far the best organized of all the campus visits (which included many that are higher ranked than WUSTL). Here are all the things they did right:

  1. The welcome packet provided a detailed schedule, map, and a parking permit (only college to do so).
  2. Admissions staff waiting outside the admissions office ready to direct people to the right place.
  3. Admissions staff continuing to wait outside after the info session started to welcome late arrivals.
  4. Very good information session.
  5. Plenty of campus tour guides--one for every 10 students or so.
  6. All campus tour guides had portable loudspeakers so they could be heard clearly over the construction that was going on throughout the campus.
  7. There were several food options open during our summer visit--even through there were few students. The food was excellent.
  8. Everyone was friendly, ranging from the admissions staff, to the people providing the info session, the tour guides, even the people serving lunch.

These are marks of an outstanding management team. That too costs money, and in WashU’s case it was clearly well spent.

476

@hebegebe I agree with you about how a college has to manage its funding. NYU and Wake Forest, for example, are often derided for having poor financial aid. Both have lower endowments per capita than many of their peers. Until I began to research this, I never knew that, even with 60K price tags, colleges need endowment money to subsidize students.

Many LACs often discount the tuition price tag a lot, and it looks like a good deal. Then you look at the amount the school is spending to educate its undergrads. It’s even worse with non-flagship publics. In our college search we have considered expenditures per FTE student as one of the most significant factors.

477

This thread is about the USNWR rankings, not those set up by LBad. Pretty much every post after that was off topic, and has thus been deleted.

478

@Penn95

I see two downsides to including salaries in an undergrad ranking formula:

  1. Certain majors lead to jobs with higher early salaries, like Engineering and Finance. So schools with the highest percentages of students that major in those “high early pay” majors are at an advantage.
  2. Unless regional and state differences in standard of living are taken into account, schools in areas of relatively high purchasing power of $1 will have relatively lower salaries. The same job in Boston may pay 25% (or more…) more than that job pays in, say, Arkansas.
479

@PetulaClark ,

“Many LACs often discount the tuition price tag a lot, and it looks like a good deal. Then you look at the amount the school is spending to educate its undergrads.”

I’m wondering … how do you really know how much a school is spending to educate its undergrads. If you know anything about accounting, you know that spreading things like fixed costs, while convention, is not mean to indicate the actual experience on the margin.

And, w/ LACs, there’s one thing that’s not reducible to an accounting number: the effect, or advantage, of an advantageous faculty to student ratio, and the prevalence of small classes.

As I often say when defending small colleges: all throughout our children’s education, we fight (and many of us pay) for smaller class sizes. And there is only one reason we do this: because we feel that it directly impacts our kids’ educations. Nobody wants to send their kid to the high school with the largest class sizes.

Then, all of sudden, one year later, it doesn’t matter that your kid is learning economics, an area often not taught in high schools, in an auditorium with 850 kids taught by a TA.

How do you factor that in your calculus of “spending per student”.

Understand that at mega U, spending per student is going to include a lot crap that doesn’t matter to your child’s undergraduate education, and it’s also going to include a lot of stuff your kid will never see or touch.

No, the LAC will never be a “good deal” from a value punch standpoint. It’s damn expensive. But is still the gold standard in undergraduate education.

There is a reason why kids, including mine, who have options, choose to forego ESPN College Game Day coming to their campus. It’s not that they all hate division 1 sports or that they all lack pride in their respective state flagships.

Someone cited an article about Vanderbilt profs, and how at the time of a study or review of something related to this, the number of faculty at Vandy who sent their kids to LACs was in the 80 to 85% range.

While I’ve certainly never done a study myself, that is certainly consistent with my anecdotal experience here in Seattle and in Palo Alto.

FInally, I assume when you mean “discount the tuition price tag”, you are referring to financial aid, correct? I assume that’s not a point of criticism.

480

@prezbucky , that is very spot on. Especially the part about ‘high early pay’ as it relates to engineering.

I know a lot of engineers who seemed to be making a ton of $$ after college, and they’ve been humming along with relatively modest raises since, and most of us have blown past them at this point.

Of course, it depends on what you do and how good you are. But engineering is no get-rich quick scheme, that’s for darn sure. Great education, in that it is damn rigorous and prepares a kid for many challenges, but in an of itself, starting salaries for engineers can be misleading.